Category: Musings

I don’t get what’s happening—I feel like a blur. I’m no longer part of anything, more so really, I no longer want to be part of anything. I think I’m losing myself, or at least the sense of myself. It’s like I’ve lost purpose.

What do your emotions compensate for in the absence of anger? Is it pain? Is it really? Or is it just that—an absence? Isn’t that all the more frightening than pain—losing the ability to feel?

It is so surreal—didn’t realize it felt this enlivening to die on the inside. I didn’t realize I could die and yet still stand to breathe—to pretend to live.

What is it about—this whole thing? What is it about?

I know I remember saying that the human race was put here only to fit the purpose of existing. I remember telling myself I could deal with that—but I don’t want to just exist. I want to live.

And it is so depressing realizing that all I will ever come to have to call a legacy was the fact that I existed. That isn’t much. Oblivion, my friend.

What is the point? I give up being the happy person. I’ll be what my baser self tells me to be. I’m done being on the emotional and moral high ground. I’m done being a better person for other people. I want to be left alone to be what we were all supposed to be—mediocre.

It’s a hot school day again and after my first period is a looong lunch break. I usually hang out in the school library where there’s air conditioning and wifi (that you have to hunt for), but today I went home because I wanted to get out of my clothes and take a cold shower. Right now, I’m lying around the house in my underwear (not meant to be sexual, it is just so humid).

I’m posting this because I wanted to talk about how much I hate hot, humid and sticky school days. First of all, if it isn’t summer, it means there’s a storm coming (I hate typhoons). Second, any amount of clothing is ‘too much’ clothing but you can’t really go to school naked (UGH). Third, too many people are sweating and sweaty-elbow-bumping in class is so not cool (I am not in the mood to share pheromones).

I’m also home because the food is better here. So yeah, catch you after lunch! :)

Every day I tell myself to save money, so every day I save whatever little is left from my allowance. But after a week or so, I buy something new and my finances are back to zero again in the blink of an eye. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I have a big allowance and save up a lot, to tell you the truth, my allowance everyday is 50 pesos (I’m from the Philippines, convert the currency so you better understand what 50 pesos means). It’s an okay enough deal for me because I go home after every day so I basically only need to spend on transportation and small fees like handouts and the like.

The thing is, though, that after I started going to college my mom would always tell me to save up and use my own money when I asked for basic needs like shampoo or tampons. Yeah, okay, a lot of parents do that but I don’t get a lot to start with. After a day at school, I am left with 10 pesos or less—and you can’t buy much with 10 pesos. When I ask for extra the answer is always, why can’t you save money like a responsible person.

So, right now, what I’m doing is saving up money—this money goes into a glass piggybank that everyday I am tempted to break open—so I can start a new bank account. One that only I control and one that my mom can’t get into. I’m waiting until I’m finally 18 so I can get a part time job tutoring younger kids lessons I learned ages ago and getting paid through a bank so there’s never any cash on me. Some of you might tell me to get part time now, but, let me remind you again, I’m in the Philippines. There aren’t a lot of part time jobs for underage students. It’s like a requirement or something.

Then there’s the subject of med school. Remember every Christmas when relatives send you envelopes full of cash, well that’s a serious thing here. My parents told me that all the money I get from aunts, and uncles, and godmothers, and godfathers will all go into an account my mom set up for me when I was a kid. She said ten years down the road, this will be for your college tuition. It’s been twelve years and I haven’t even had a wiff of that account again. I asked about it, she asked what I was talking about. Knowing my mother, it probably got used to pay off some debt from god-knows-when. I’m waiting until I can get a part time job to actually save money so I can go to med school then I can finally make bigger money so I can get out of this life. WOW, that was a long-winded sentence.

I want my freedom—financial and otherwise. I won’t mind if a lot of hardships come with it, I just want to call something my own. When am I finally going to be legal 18?

I used to think that friends were there so you had someone to hang with, to laugh with, to do crazy stuff with—they were there so you wouldn’t feel lonely.

After years of, what I believe to be, personal growth, I realize friends are there because you have a level of connection. Maybe it’s an inside joke only the two of you get or an experience you’ve shared, whatever it is, there has to be some kind of glue that holds you together. The more shit you’ve gone through the gluey stuff keeps getting stronger.

So why is it that friendships can still fall out?

Honestly, I always thought that we had each others’ backs but I guess we were too young to know what it meant. Sometimes I remember the days we’d laugh at the most random thing we could think of. Don’t worry though, I don’t feel pain or sadness. All I feel was that I wasted too much of my time being there for you even if you could hardly do the same.

So yes, I never asked for anything and maybe you thought I didn’t need you to be there, but that was just because you never made me feel like I could ask. It never even felt like you would be able to help me.

I don’t see those years with hatred, like I said, all I see is wasted time.

I do know why it was we were growing away from each other, and it was that first time I said no. It must have been so shocking for you, hearing me say ‘No’ to you for the first time in years. You never said so, but I knew you were angry the next few days.

We’d met other friends, made other connections, I guess I wanted you to help yourself so I stopped doing everything you asked—and you asked for so much and always so sweetly. I wanted you to learn that you wouldn’t always have someone that would do your homework for you.

And I grew up.

You said I’d changed, that I didn’t seem like the same person, that I liked different things. I saw that too—I didn’t like studying just a day before the exam anymore, I didn’t like too much gossip anymore, long nights of staying up watching anime when I could have been studying seemed a bad idea. I grew up and I wanted you to as well. But you wouldn’t let me help you that way.

I wanted to teach you how to work things out yourself, you wanted me to just do the work. And then I wouldn’t help because I wanted you to learn. It was a vicious loop.

I understood nothing was working and I snapped one day. It was so sudden, years of friendship ended in one moment. There was nothing after, we’d gone from calling each other best friends to acting like we never met in a day. The next day we saw each other and looked away.

To tell you the truth, I don’t remember what your eyes looked like. I feel like I’ve never really looked at you. And yes I still hang out with my friends, laugh with them and do the craziest shit together but I don’t miss them when I feel lonely—I miss them in the middle of the day when the world is going through my mind, when I’m surrounded by too many people and I am having the greatest time, they pierce into my thoughts and I say to myself, “This would be even greater if they were here.”

I would have been home and finished with my finals—reading a good book or two softly reclining on an easy chair. Instead, I am alone in my dorm room as the the other residents are slowly leaving one by one. Yet, here I am and still unable to decide whether I’ll be going home or staying here. As much as I want to keep avoiding the question, necessity requires an answer. “What happens now?”

What exactly is going to happen now? After the storm, I and several students from UP Tacloban have gone to the university’s flagship campus in Diliman looking for refuge and hopefully find a would-be lost semester.

That semester is now over and the other students are on their individual ways back to their hometowns. I am still here though, what happens to me? I didn’t take any majors because there weren’t any to take. I wasted a semester.

What do you do when you waste something? You make up for it.

And so I will, this summer.

Which is why I ask, “What happens now?”

There is nowhere to go at the moment but another UP campus in Cebu—and so to Cebu I shall point my lens and efforts.

It’s been a couple of months since we moved into Yakal Residence Hall. Everything on my side of the room is now blue. I have so much to say about this dorm, the people, the happenings, but I won’t say them now. And I know it’s been a really long time since I last posted something, I’ve just been living without a computer for the past few months. Which is sad, really. I miss my old laptop. Hahahaha. Til next time guys!

It is bright outside, and yet the gloom indoors sets about an ethereal feeling of disconnection from time—as though the darkness is in itself a bubble which seclude us from reality. The small rays drifting through the small, high, open window cut through the black of the room—the only evidence of day.

I awake with a sense of isolation. The body next to mine breathes slowly—my friend. In company, but alone. The quiet is eerie and the sound of the wind lashing through the window is so soft, it barely has the right to be called a sound at all. In this profound silence, ideas rush. And to hear yourself think without distraction is truly deafening. Empty thoughts ricochet against the walls of an empty head and it is painful to listen to.